2008-02-25

I had installed VMWare server on Ubuntu with little pain, but it would not keep the time stable in the XP guest. I had installed the VMWare tools, but it wouldn't help - it would get up to a day off in a short period of time.

Turns out that my processors automatically scale down (Core 2 Quads), and so I needed to edit /etc/vmware/config and add the line host.cpukHz = 2400000 which is the correct one for my 2.4GHz CPU. After this, I restarted the vmware-server service, and the time is perfectly synced.

I was able to confirm the kHz number to use by running burnp6 from the cpuburn package on all four cores and looking at /proc/cpuinfo to see what speed it reached.